A Bartender Who Stirs and Shakes but Allows No New Twists

By WILLIAM GRIMES

Published: March 27, 1991

THE last time bartenders made a dent in the national consciousness, Tom Cruise and Bryan Brown in the movie "Cocktail" were throwing shakers like Indian clubs before a barroom full of groupies. It was not a pretty sight.

"If I saw my people doing anything like that, they'd be fired," said Dale DeGroff, the head bartender at the Rainbow Room in Rockefeller Center. Rightly so. The bartender's art, as Mr. DeGroff made clear at a recent six-hour seminar on the subject at the French Culinary Institute, demands subtlety, a discriminating palate and, perhaps most of all, restraint.

Take the Bloody Mary, which Mr. DeGroff calls "the most abused drink in this country." Too many bartenders, he said, overdo the Tabasco and Worcestershire.

"They want something that will fry your tonsils, when the beauty of it is the sweetness of the tomato juice," Mr. DeGroff said. More than a dash or two of Worcestershire creates a "muddy" drink, he warned. The Tabasco should add piquancy but not immolate the taste buds. And don't overlook the ice cubes. The small, saucer-shaped ice disks supplied by the Culinary Institute did not make the grade; small cubes melt too fast, and just as bad, in Mr. DeGroff's estimation, "they lack character." Large square cubes only, please.

The finicky ice-cube policy is consistent with Mr. DeGroff's general philosophy of drink. He is a purist and a classicist, a scholar of the cocktail who goes to great lengths to insure authenticity. For his Sazeracs, he sends to New Orleans for genuine Peychaud bitters. He uses arcane flavorings like Falernum, a spicy West Indian syrup; orgeat, an almond syrup, and Pimento, a Jamaican allspice liqueur.

Often he riffles through his collection of old bar books, which date back a century and more, in search of forgotten American concoctions. The cocktail menu he has developed at the Rainbow Room shows an antiquarian's bent. The Algonquin, the Sidecar, the Stork Club: these are names that evoke the Nick and Nora Charles age of stylish drinking.

The 41-year-old Mr. DeGroff, who bears a passing resemblance to the actor Harvey Keitel, has developed his techniques and his ideas over nearly 20 years as a bartender. In the early 1970's, as a struggling actor in New York, he found himself pouring drinks for special functions at Gracie Mansion, the Mayor's official residence. Then he graduated to full-time bar work at Charley O's, established by the restaurateur Joseph Baum, his current boss. It was the tail end of a great era, when lunch meant three martinis and Manhattanites knew their manhattans.

In 1979 he landed a job tending bar at the Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles. There, he said, "I learned finesse." He also learned showmanship. "The bar is a stage," Mr. DeGroff said. "The curtain goes up, the spotlight is on you and you perform." When shaking a cocktail, he counts a slow 10 and works his silver shaker hard, alternating between a graceful over-the-shoulder flourish and a front-of-the-body maraca-style move.

On returning to New York in 1985, Mr. DeGroff helped Mr. Baum open Aurora, a midtown restaurant, serving as its head bartender. Two years later he moved to the Rainbow Room, which had recently undergone a complete make-over. There, the elegant 1930's decor dovetailed perfectly with his love for the classic American cocktails that held sway before the age of limp spritzers, Fuzzy Navels, purple Jell-O shots and worse.

Mr. DeGroff keeps a little list of what he calls "disco drinks," a hellish compilation of the worst alcoholic drinks currently on offer. The front-runner at the moment is the Brain Tumor: Bailey's Irish Cream with a splash of Chambord, which spreads raspberry-colored tentacles through the glass until, Mr. DeGroff said, "it looks like brain matter." Bottoms up.

Such are the drinks he has sworn to combat, in a perhaps anachronistic struggle against the forces of vulgar innovation and faddery. But Mr. DeGroff is a throwback, when you come down to it. Unlike most modern bartenders, he has a sense of vocation and a respect for history. In a neo-Prohibitionist age, he's proud to stand up and announce without embarrassment that he likes bars.

"The saloons of New York are a natural resource, like the redwoods in California," he said. "I like to think of myself as a sort of forest ranger."

For seminar purposes, Mr. DeGroff demonstrated his own variation on the old-fashioned, as well as the Bloody Mary, the Sazerac, the Ramos gin fizz (another New Orleans classic), the Cuban mojito, the coffee cocktail, the flamingo, the mint julep and the Ritz, a Champagne drink that he created as head bartender at Aurora. Participants in the workshop sliced, squeezed, mixed, shook and tasted along with Mr. DeGroff, imbibing, along the way, these tips:

* Always squeeze fresh fruit, and use the juice sparingly. When using an electric juicer, be careful not to get any of the bitter inside rind into the juice.

* Keep a bottle of simple syrup at hand for sweetening. To make, mix equal parts (by volume) of water and white sugar in a saucepan; then bring to a boil and turn the heat off.

* Use the best mixing ingredients your budget allows. The better the base spirit, the better the drink. Good liquor is not wasted in a cocktail.